The story so far....

Alan and I bought our house back in 1995 and had empty blocks either side of us for 14 years. After having a house built next to us....and the people living there having two annoying loud barking dogs, we realised we liked the idea of not having anyone living right next to us!!

We started looking around Hamilton for a house with no close neighbours and of course we found two houses. I liked one and Alan liked the other and we couldn't agree and choose one! Next idea, why don't we build a house that has everything we both want? We looked around for a block of land and found one just on the outskirts of Hamilton, just under 5 acres. We put an offer on the block in February 2012 and it was accepted.

Our block

We put our house on the market in April....and then waited.

Our house we were selling

We started looking for a house plan we liked. We searching for quite a while and found a plan we liked on the internet. We spoke to a local builder in Hamilton and after modifying the plan quite a bit we got a quote that we were happy with and signed on the dotted line to start building once our house was sold.

We managed to save up enough money to get the slab put down. The builder said that would save us some time once our house was sold so that got done on the 28/11/2012. Our block is 100 metres wide so we choose a house that is quite long at 37.5 metres. It is going to be quite a large house with 4 bedrooms, one with a walk in robe and ensuite, a study, open plan kitchen/dining and lounge, a large room which is going to have a pool table, theatre, walk in pantry and linen closet, double garage with room for a workshop at the end and also a large uncover deck.

The start of the slab 19/11/2012

Ready for concrete 27/11/2012

Pour the slab 28/11/2012

  

We'd had only a couple of people through our house, there wasn't much interest so we decided to drop the price in early December. The week before Christmas we had 2 lots of people look, so then we got hope full that it might sell soon! On the 7th of January we had another couple look. They came back on the 9th of January to have another look and then made an offer that night. They were really keen to have a short settlement and wanted to move in as soon as possible. Our bank made that extremely difficult and took a long time to give us a settlement date. We ended up moving out on the 1st of February and they rented the house off of us until we finally got a settlement which was supposed to be the 15th of March but once again the bank was hopeless and we finally ended up settling the house on the 22nd of march.